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Blogger Objects To Accusations Surrounding Vista DRM
Technical Writing Geek writes "Self-described 'professional paranoid' Peter Gutmann of the University of Auckland has become the most widely quoted source of information on DRM and content protection in Windows Vista. The trouble is, according to ZDNet Blogger Ed Bott, Gutmann's work is riddled with factual errors, distortions, contradictions, and outright untruths. From the lengthy piece: 'As Gutmann would know if he actually understood how HD hardware works, Vista will indeed display HD content on this monitor over the D-Sub and component video outputs, which are capable of outputting 1080p and 1080i signals, respectively. In the future, a content provider might choose to constrict the output to these devices, but that decision would apply only to a specific piece of media, and it would have to be disclosed on the package, giving the buyer the opportunity to choose not to purchase it.'"
Watching a protected video will just cause your network utilisation to drop below 0.3%.
You can't play DRMed HD over a "vanilla" DVI port. This is a known fact. Unless the port supports HDCP (not part of the official DVI standard, and known for LOTS of interoperability problems - see Westinghouse TVs vs. PS3 for example), you're screwed.
Also, the article summary attacks Guttman for claiming that HD can't be played over an analog port. Both are wrong here. DRMed HD can currently be played over an analog port because few discs enable the ICT (Image Constraint Token), but it's just a matter of time before the ICT starts getting flipped on and analog outputs start going to half resolution. I've heard rumors that some cable systems enable ICT for all cable content already.
Note: When I say "DRMed HD" I am referring primarily to the most well-known sources of DRMed high def content, Blu-Ray and HD-DVD. Both have these limitations among others.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
In other words Vista will display HD images but only in un-DRM mode, and if you try to pay a movie that you have bought and paid for but which has the flag set for 'trusted output path' or whatever they call it, Vista will refuse to display it. Which is, I think, the point Peter Gutmann was trying to make.
It's also worth noting that the only software players capable of playing BluRay and HD-DVD discs on PCs are the commercial products PowerDVD and WinDVD. Both of these players restrict output to something like 900x500 if the player detects that anything other than HDMI is being used. The discs themselves and the OS are not responsible for this decision. Both PowerDVD and WinDVD decided on their own to restrict output on HD-DVD and BluRay if HDMI is not in use. None of the movie studios have objected to this policy. So while the discs themselves and Windows Vista are not restricting HD content output, the only players available are restricting this output. None of the currently available HD-DVD and BluRay discs have turned on the flag on the disc that restricts output if HDMI is not in use, but that could change at any point in the future.
What an annoying article: spread over 5 pages, each of which takes my browser 10s of seconds each to render, and a link to a print version that doesn't work if you have no printer! I usually surf without JS, and even after allowing some JS I still couldn't get to the all-on-one page version. So here's the full article (I've not read it, but it looks like just pro-MS propaganda, and the usual falacy with n00bs that computers are fast these days so it doesn't matter you're running bloat):
Everything you've read about Vista DRM is wrong (Part 1)
Last month, I wrote about the FUD surrounding Windows Vista and DRM. The FUDmaster is Peter Gutmann, a New Zealand researcher who wrote a paper last December that made a series of outrageous and inflammatory claims about Windows Vista. Since then, Gutmann has expanded the paper to more than four times its original size. The current version available on Gutmann's website clocks in at more than 26,000 words, making it longer than some recent works of fiction.
And length isn't the only thing Gutmann's paper has in common with the average pulp novel. Gutmann's work is riddled with factual errors, mistaken assumptions and unproven assertions, distortions, contradictions, misquotes, and outright untruths. In short, it's a work of fiction all on its own.
Gutmann is a clever writer, and he's able to string together nouns, verbs, technical terms,and acronyms in ways that sound persuasive. In this three-part series (look for Parts 2 and 3 later this week), I'm going to dig deep into Gutmann's work and show you just where he got it wrong.
I've been working on this story for months. Part of the problem is that Gutmann's paper is a rambling, sloppy, disorganized mess, and nine months of additions have made it even more difficult to pick out the serious arguments from the scare stories and snark. Gutmann's favorite technique is to string together anecdotes he's plucked from magazines and websites, juxtapose those stories with sentences from presentations by Microsoft engineers and developers, and then speculate on the implications, often with wildly incorrect results. And worst of all, Gutmann appears to believe everything he reads--as long as he can fit it into his anti-Microsoft world view.
The other part of the problem is Gutmann's lack of hands-on experience with modern consumer electronics gear and with Windows Vista itself, which shows in nearly every sentence he writes. I've done extensive hands-on testing and have personally seen Vista do things that Gutmann says are impossible. Rather than write 26,000 words of my own, I'm going to pick out more than a dozen substantive errors in Gutmann's piece and explain why they're wrong.
With that introduction out of the way, let's get started.
ERROR #1: ARE SAMSUNG'S HD MONITORS WINDOWS VISTA-COMPATIBLE? YES.
In his role as self-appointed consumer advocate, Gutmann seems determined to tell you and me about products we shouldn't buy. Like Samsung's big LCD monitors:
One of the big news items at the 2007 Consumer Electronics Show (CES 2007), the world's premier event for consumer high-tech, was Samsung's 1920×1200 HD-capable 27 LCD monitor, the Syncmaster 275T [...] The only problem with this amazing HD monitor is that Vista won't display HD content on it because it doesn't consider any of its many input connectors (DVI-D, 15-pin D-Sub, S-Video, and component video, but no HDMI with HDCP) secure enough. So you can do almost anything with this HD monitor except view HD content on it. [emphasis added]
Wrong! Because Gutmann has no hands-on experience with this technology, he doesn't realize that DVI-D is indeed a fully compatible HDCP output. You can use a DVI-to-HDMI cable or a simple DVI-to-HDMI adapter. This monitor meets all the Windows Vista logo requirements for full playback of all high-definition digital media, protected and unprotected. Here's the information on this exact monitor, taken directly from Samsung's Australia site,
http://blogs.msdn.com/larryosterman/archive/2007/08/28/windows-vista-sound-causes-network-throughput-slowdowns.aspx
Straight from a senior developer at MS who worked mostly on the audio system in Vista.
Summary version: they ARE fixing it, because it IS a bug and NOT an intentional hack.